Call me Rilke Junior. An art student emailed me in desperation, her art school has a godawful New Genres program – usually an excuse for faculty to kick back and students to jerk off and pontificate about nothing. Any way, she was losing faith in art. So here is my response:

If it is any consolation, your perceptions are right on and shared by most people in art school – but they get to the point you are at about a week before graduation.

The critique that “it has been done before” is a great cop-out. The first guy who tells you that about something you make in a crit you interrupt him and say “Fucking chicks has been done before, are you gonna turn down an offer to get laid?” Be aggressive, as most big-mouths in art schools are complete wusses and the teachers are usually ecstatic when the pompous asses get taken down a notch.

“It has been done before” is a diminishment, an insult. WHERE? WHEN? It is a destroyer of faith, an admonition to not try. People analyze recent art history try to find the only art that can evade the death-ray like powers of the “it has been done before.” They come up with shock art and art that is a clever and conceptual one-liner. Art is so much more than this bullshit.

IF EVERYTHING HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE HOW COME NOTHING HAS BEEN SOLVED OR RESOLVED? (Kurt Cobain diaries)

Great art is when you find a medium that carries your voice. When you see the world and you present or re-present what you see in a way that only you can do.

Art does not necessarily have to fight or prove a point or defend a position, the whole concept of the “crit” deludes people into thinking this and influences the fundamental construction of their art. A therapist who works with artists once told me she was shocked at how many artists come to her because they are making art to win an argument with a long-ago art school classmate, or are still painting like a professor demanded they do even though they don’t want to anymore – if they ever did ever at all.

When these new genres allegedly critique American culture, I am always reminded of a saying by Warhol about the bourgeoisie, I can update it for you: You can spot a true yuppie, they are always dissing the yuppies. You can spot a true American, they are always repulsed by American culture.

When someone tells you that it has been done before you can always ask:“HAS IT?”
or “SO?”
or “JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T GET MY PIECE IS NO REASON TO ASSUME I A MIMICKING SOMETHING THREE DECADES OLD. I AM MAKING ART, NOT PARROTING ART HISTORY TEXTBOOKS.”

The fact that you hate the crit and do not want to participate is a sign that you are beyond needing something to react against. Crits are to be hated but over time people have made them a whole lifestyle of conforming their art to pass the crit. You should fail miserably in a crit, a genius is always apparent when a group of dunces is conspiring against her.

My live journal is one year old today! It is also Nolan Ryan’s birthday. Why this is not a national holiday troubles me as an American. Ask yourself – Wouldn’t you like to take January 31st off of work to remember the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball? It is the National Pastime (the Supeme Court even ruled that it was).

I Fed Ex’d all of the images to England at Noon. They’re either gonna love it or they’re gonna be stuck with it, but it is an excellent cross section of Los Angeles art. Marc Foxx told me that the advertising rep for the magazine has been making the rounds and is gorgeous. I hit a few galleries today. Chinatown was eerily quiet. China Art Objects was open but the lights were not on. The new issue of Flash Art has an interview with Giovanni Intra, published posthumously, where he talks about how he got high in the desert and started a gallery. But i am a bad person for printing the widely-held belief that a drug overdose was probably to blame for the 34 year old’s death. Inmo gallery looked like all of the personal affects that were likely stored in the basement were filling up the galelry space. Happy Lion had a smaller version of the show from Leo Koenig’s Las Vegas space. Lisa ryter’s painitngs are okay, one was sold and one was avaailable for ten thousand dollars. Eh…

Acuna Hansen had a sign that said back at five at 4:45 and was dark when i came back after dinner at around 6 p.m.

I just took a nap. It was awesome. Almost done with this big article….

I got the final slide for this article I am writing today. All the photos ship to London Fed Ex tomorrow, and I am 3/4 through on the article itself.

The mag wanted a “contributor’s photo” so i looked up Bob Bertero. He is really sick, the loft below his here at the Brewery Art Colony is totally toxic, they spray furniture with illegal lacquer, the fumes are killing him, he looks really bad. I felt awful for him seeing him. Standing in his loft for five minutes getting photographed and made me sick as well. He is moving back to Texas next week. The photo looks cool, his place was cold and i kept my knit cap on, so it is a quirky shot. He took a photo of me dressed in military fatigues holding a paintbrush and a copy of Coagula in 1995 that we used to use for publicity.

The final slide was from Kim Dingle. I drove over to her coffee shop in Eagle Rock. She has been in business a coupe of years now it seems. Some of her friends have still yet to eat there, but I love it. It is called Fatty’s, it is on Colorado Boulevard. Kim and her partner Aude serve the best espresso on earth and i love espresso more than anything except sex, writing and sleep. Anyway, Kim’s studio is in the back of the building. All of her slides and press clippings are there. In large piles. Many piles, all of them large. I found a slide of a painting of her’s of two pubescent girls in their underwear wrestling. It is so awesome. She said it was exhibited by Sperone Westwater at the Basel art fair two years ago.

In her studio, she was working on a painting of a coffee cup with the Fatty’s logo projectiling out a creamy latte. It looks like a brown Franz Kline painting flying out of a coffee cup. She told me it is based on a true incident where she threw an iced capuccino into the face of a belligerent customer. You meet her and you would never now it. You look at her paintings and you wonder where the energy and anger come from. Then you hear an anecdote like that and it all just clicks. You wonder how her ex-gallery dealers Blum & Poe are still walking.

We gabbed for like five hours. I have known Kim since we were students at Cal State L.A. in 1988. She told me her ex-dealer Tim Blum recently showed up at her coffee shop with artist Sharon Lockhart. I have always been interested in how much time those two spend together and have published allegations about the depth of their relationship in the past. Kim told me my speculation was probably more a fantasy than reality, but I offered a credible discussion of known facts. I reminded her of the time she and I were told by a collector how much her dealer Jeff Poe really charged for a painting and Kim hit the roof, as Poe of course had shortchanged her. Oh, an art dealer didn’t pay the artist. Shock! Kim reminded me that she got paid after one angry phone call. Blum & Poe are not exactly inept, but they don’t realize that people out here in the art world keep tabs and have long memories.

I swear this is a true story. It was 1977 or 78. It was 8th grade. Saint Paul of the Cross Grade School in La Mirada, California (the only school I ever graduated from, the only school I still have nightmares about). The kid in front of me for all 8 years of grade school was Glen G. (I am not gonna write his whole name because of google searches). Anyway, looking back, he was a pretty precocious and intelligent kid. He liked the Beatles and had a troop in boy scouts change its name to the Beatle pack and they got custom arm patches and stuff, anyway, lots of little things like that to indicate that he was precocious, and I always liked him fair enough.

We would have art class like every other friday as an afterthought or if the teacher was tired. It consisted of getting one piece of paper and a box of crayons and being given forty five minutes to make a drawing. Now, it was a given that there three or four boys and five or six girls in the class of forty who could draw good. Good of course being somewhat realistic. The rest of us were just expected to not scribble and that was art class.

So one day Sister Aquila passes out the paper and the crayons and Glen gets the idea to do modern art. I guess he had been to a museum or something with his parents or older sister earlier that month or whatever, but he goes balls out and makes a geometric abstraction with a theme, it is tax accounting forms all composed in off center croppings making a cubist collage. He even drew a woodgrain-frame around the edge of the paper with a gold nameplate.

Meanwhile i am probably drawing Chester Arthur as a pitcher for the Angels or something out of it and, of course, poorly drawn by the classically inspired standards of the school. But Glen was going to town and I was really impressed. But I knew the nun would flip. His rendering ability was great and the artwork was something like I had never seen. But I knew it was going to cause trouble but I didn’t say anything, just kept trying to shade whatever the hell i was drawing, I got yelled at once in fifth grade by Sister Gustave for giving Jesus big nostrils in a drawing, so I made sure to draw faces staring straight ahead. I got called in once to the principal for a drawing of heaven as a dormitory of bunk beds for saints. Sister Estelle was satisfied with my explanation.

So here comes the nun up our row. Row one. John Caulfield always sat in the first chair and answered the door, but I don’t blame him for letting in Father Mike Baker all those times even though some of us (not me, and not John) got molested by him (I only found out all this last year). Then it was Byron C., Dysthe, Feeley, Glen and then me. It was two and a half rows of boys and three and a half rows of girls (I think the 2nd row went: Kretschmar, Lombardo, Macias, Malone Martinez, Morehouse). Just before she got to Glen I said something like, “I don’t think she is gonna like that,” and he looked at me the way a precocious kid looks at a regular kid, like i didn’t understand.

But I understood.

The nun flipped out. Glen calmly, and even in a chipper manner, tried to explain, but she was shaking, raging, she tore the thing up. He was dumbfounded and devastated and silenced and embittered in a matter of seconds as she raged in some unimaginable fury. She threatened to never have art class again, which was like no big deal to me, one of the majority bad drawers, but her yelling at the class always hinted that some greater calamity could be landing on the whole class. For a day at least, Glen was the bad soul. But, good or bad, I saw his soul just leave that day, right while she was yelling at him. Man, I hope it came back in some manifestation later in his life because he really was a smart and inventive spirit. Glen was precocious, but I was a bit beyond him, because i knew she would make us all suffer after losing it in the face of genius and by 1977 I had gotten pretty good at hiding mine.

I am going nuts because i have been on a total SMITHS jag for like, three weeks, and I have all of their albums and have been playing them almost continually, and, well, there is a girl sleeping in my bed right now so i can’t be blasting my stereo and the songs are in my head and it is maddening not having the release of hearing the songs, sort of an aesthetic crisis here – the need to possess the experience of art thoroughly by reliving it rather than just remembering it. Maybe that is why sports is not art, because the next season comes along…

Well, it is almost 3 a.m. and i want MORE Smiths, but I own everything they have done, so it is time to purchase Morrisey Solo Albums. Can anyone succinctly explain which ones i should get and which I should avoid?

I have heard there are some real turkeys and I have a very low tolerance for lousy albums and movies. If I see a bad film, I don’t go to the movies for, like, a year. Watching the Green Bay Packers get stomped by the Falcons int he playoffs earlier this month made me hate and resent football. I once bought a tape by Bob Dylan, and album called Under The Red Sky that really stunk, and after listening to one side and half of side two, I turned it off and didn’t listen to music for about ten months. It was still in my tape player when my roof leaked and ruined all of my stuff in 1993.

Went to a party at James Hill’s loft here at the Brewery Art Colony. I was under the impression that the party was to celebrate the installation of Jim’s massive new sculpture in front of the Burbank Headquarters of Industrial Metal Supply Corp., but his wife, artist Shari Lee actually organized it for his 40th birthday. It was a good time. I saw Llyn Foulkes at the party and arranged to pick up a slide of his work for this article I am working on. He seemed pleased to be included. That leaves one artist, Kim Dingle, and I think i will swing by her coffee shop tomorrow on my way to a Super Bowl Party. There was also a “Burning Man” type party and an Art Center party here at the Brewery Art Colony tonight, but I felt pretty old seeing all of these kids with their frickin ski caps (it was not even jacket weather, maybe 75 degrees) and cups of kegged beer. I came home and read poetry to my girlfriend, she got all mushy but then went to sleep. I am still wide awake.

This afternoon there was decent foot traffic for Salerno’s exhibition. Artist Marc Hix came by, as did a young collector who it turns out is the road manager for Charlie Hayden (jazz musician). It looks like I will be curating a show in early Summer at Bergamot Station, but I won’t jinx it here until all the formalities are taken care of (although I have already shook on it with this particular gallerist).

I went by some galleries today to get slides to send to the European Art Magazine. I have to Fed-Ex everything by Monday to London. Coordinating all of this is going to be hectic. I am organizing the artists into 6 groups of four artists. Each group is a trend I have kind of noticed, maybe like that scammy book Megatrends from 20 years ago. I recall my dad had the deluxe cassette taped version of that and he insisted that i listen to it in order to “understand how the world works.” Whenever I felt the need to make a teacher think I was on the ball i would parrot a passage or two (hey, it was a bestseller), so maybe some British art school kids can quote from my article to impress their teachers.

So the galleries behaved funny about the slides. One gallery sat me down in a small but luxurious back room, offered me coffee, cocktails and flattered me endlessly, gave me catalogs of artists of their gallery, debated the merit of each slide but always deferred to my subtlest opinion, gave me a little gossip, reminded me what women in the gallery were still single – the basic thorough asslicking. I left with a bag of catalogs and a beautiful matted 4×5 transparency.

The other gallery had a part-time employee who was reticent to even let me look at an artist’s slides. i was like, “uh, I know you want to be a good employee and not get yelled at, but if I leave here without a slide, I think the artist is going to be upset when I tell her that she could have had her painting in a big art magazine in Europe.” The poor assistant looked so confused and unsure, it really underscored that the gallery owner must be uptight and strict. So I was about a foot from walking out the door when the part-timer runs up with a cordless phone with the gallerist on the other end. The gallerist wants to know why i want a slide.

Let me digress here, a 35 mm slide (much smaller than a 4×5) costs about 2 bucks to duplicate, about 75 cents when a lot are done at once (which is usually the case, as an artist will get the gallery an original slide and they will get five or six dupes of ten or twelve paintings). The only reason to not give someone with a halfway decent story a slide is the fear that they would be making a giclee print of the art on a high-end scanner. It took me all day to figure out a scenario whereby one would be reticent to just give someone who asked for a slide their pick of the lot. Or if a teacher lectured on a gallery’s artists, and then another teacher and another, hey a gallery could just sell slide packets. Anyway, there was no fiscal reason to not show me the slides and hardly any reason to not part with one of the hundred or so they had of this artist’s work.

Even funnier, after the gallerist realized that this was a big deal and had no problem in parting with her 75 cent promotional tool, the employee hands me the slides and there are no title labels on half of them. I about fucking died. I finally find a good one properly labeled and get ready to split -nope – there is a contract to be signed, that i will return the slide in good condition. This is for a 35 mm slide, people.

Driving home in traffic was surreal. I don’t do it often and could really smell the car exhaust, the gas fumes like you would smell in a crowded parking structure. I usually go to a restaurant or friend’s place and wait until 7 to drive home if i am out in L.A. and it is after 4, but Friday I just aimed toward downtown and and hour later I was almost home. Eleven miles in 72 minutes. So who should call but Shana. she is writing for art magazines these days as well and pitched me a story about an artist for Coagula print edition. It sounded cool. I asked her about the gallery that was uptight about the slides, and she stopped me halfway throug my question to passionately affirm my story with a whopper even wilder than mine. She had no druthers labeling the gallery as beyond high-maintenance, high-strung. Nice to have my opinion reconfirmed. Then Shana told me about meeting Leonard Cohen at Starbucks in Mid-Wilshire. The big news is he actually prefers Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

Last night I saw About Schmidt. It was dreadful. But it was also so mid-bogglinly real, so full of tense boredom, that it was perfect. You forget that it is Jack, that is the most important thing. You couldn’t pay me a hundred dollars to sit through it again but it got under my skin. It is the two-hour midwestern version of a Bukowski poem drained of any excitement, philosophy or plot. It is the polar opposite of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where a midwester teen inspires those closest to him to live life to the fullest by celebrating the fantastic possibilities of the mundane world. Here we have a midwestern retiree doing none of that in an equally mundane American landscape.

Fortunately, I had yogurt at 21 Choices in Pasadena prior to the movie.